Analysis firm IDC today put out its projected numbers for PC growth in Q4 of 2014, and these results are better than projected. IDC initially predicted that unit sales for PCs would fall 4.8% year-over-year in Q4, but, instead, the market only fell 2.4%. While the decrease in growth is not as weak as expected, IDC still notes that 2014 is the third consecutive year of slow-down in the PC market. Many analysts have attributed the lack of recent growth to the uptake in purchases and usage of both tablets and large-screen smartphones…
According to the chart above, provided by IDC, the total amount of PCs sold during the quarter amounted to just over 80 million units. This 80 million number is just a piece of the projected total of 308 million PCs sold during the entire span of 2014. Lenovo still ranks as the number 1 PC vendor in terms of unit sales, with HP, Dell, Acer, and Apple (in order) rounding out the top 5. While Apple is the 5th on the list for global sales, the Cupertino-based company ranks as high as number 3 in the rankings specific to the United States.
IDC projects that Apple sold 5.75 million Mac units during the holiday quarter and that 2.245 million of those machines were sold just in the United States. As Ben Bajarin notes, this 5.75 million number (if accurate) would mean that the 2014 holiday quarter is Apple’s best all-time quarter for Mac sales. Apple hit an all-time high for Mac sales in its previous quarter of 2014 with 5.52 million Macs sold during the quarter. Apple reports results on January 27th. During the year-ago holiday quarter, Apple sold 4.8 million Macs. The uptake in Mac sales may be due to the release of the Retina iMac and various updates to the Mac mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.
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I’m getting a mac tomorrow. My sister has a Lenovo.
I never understand how 9to5Mac manages to be so credible in certain ways, and so like a random teenager’s tumblr account in others.
Shipments and sales are intrinsically not the same.
Research the difference between shipments and sell-through. Shipments are solely how many the manufacturer has produced and shipped out to retailers.
If I made 10 million Android devices, and shipped them out to stores I would not have sold 10 million Android devices. Twelve months later 9 million of them could still be sat in Walmart or random warehouses around the world.
When Windows 8 was first released all the OEMs went into overdrive, thinking it was their time to shine once more. They shipped a ton. But, Windows 8 wasn’t really a hit with consumers. Not many of them sold.
Another good example is with Apple. Apple generally sell everything they ship. If they ship 50 million iPhones, they’re going to get sold. But if HTC are feeling lucky and shipped 50 million of their latest phone, they’re likely not going to sell, but the IDC report would look crazy good for them (while ironically it would be crazy bad for them).
Appropriating shipments for sales, as 9to5 always does, just leads to misunderstandings and misinterpretations of what’s really going on. It’s times like this that 9to5 really feels like a simplistic blog rather than a credible journalistic entity.
With 9to5 doing these IDC reports so often you really really should start understanding the bare basics.
I didn’t bother going thru all the numbers, but you’re right about shipments vs actual sales. Apple posts actual sales numbers, as opposed to Samsung and many others that post shipment numbers instead of actual sales.
Then you have idiots on here that state that many people bought 2 iPhones, 6 and 6+ to decide which one they want to keep and return the other, and that you shouldn’t believe Apple’s sales numbers.